Hart always denied that anything outré occurred while he was at the house. He was probably telling the truth; Beatty, if not the candidate, was too smart to jeopardize the campaign with hanky-panky. Still, the star had introduced Hart to Jennifer Lee way back in January of 1973. She didn’t like him, noticed that he “laughed and laughed at everything Warren says,” and described him as “a poor man’s version of Warren. He flirts, and not well. He’s too eager and too goofy, and what an ego. He acts as if he’s arrived at a party given in his honor, smiling at every woman, every waitress, anybody whose eyes he might possibly catch.” He called her subsequently on several occasions, but she ducked him. Still, if Beatty introduced Hart to Lee, it beggars the imagination that over the years Beatty never introduced him to any of his other female friends. On the other hand, whether Beatty did or not didn’t really matter. As Bradley puts it, “A lot of the time when people imagined that they were entertaining themselves with Penthouse centerfolds, they could have been reading Thomas Jefferson together, but the perception becomes the reality.” Many Hollywood liberals opened their homes to Hart; in fact, they competed for his company. “But nooo,” continues Bradley, “Gary had to stay at Warren’s. That drove me nuts.”
Bill Dixon had become Hart’s chief of staff. Dixon had worked on the 1972 McGovern campaign and was a close friend of Hunter Thompson’s. But he had also run the Senate Banking Committee for Wisconsin senator William Proxmire, served on the board of the World Bank, and been the Wisconsin State Banking Commissioner, and as such he brought formidable credentials to the position. One of Dixon’s jobs was to manage the Beatty “account.” Sometimes he would intercept Beatty’s calls. “It wasn’t so much that Bill was trying to block Warren from talking to Gary, but he was attempting to make sure that Warren was very aware that if there were centerfolds or supermodels or starlets in the Jacuzzi with him and Gary, it was something that they should cut back or be very discreet about,” Bradley explains. Eventually, Hart began to pull away from Beatty, just enough so that it was apparent the candidate was taking his staff’s anxieties seriously.
Hart flat-out denied the rumors in an admiring New York Times Magazine profile by E. J. Dionne published on May 3, 1987, but sank himself by famously saying, “If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” Little did he know that reporters from the Miami Herald were already following him around and, as things turned out, they were not so bored as he might have wished. Hart was involved with a woman named Donna Rice. He had met her, a twenty-nine-year-old AMW (“actress, model, whatever”) at a New Year’s Day party at the home of Don Henley, former lead singer for the Eagles, in Aspen, Colorado, which he had attended as a guest of the former agent, now Orion executive, Mike Medavoy and his wife, Patricia Duff. A striking blonde, Rice had briefly dated Henley and posed for a picture in a redneck bar with one breast bared, draped in the Confederate flag. Hart began calling her from the road, usually from pay phones. He had long soulful conversations with her wherein he asked her questions like, “What do people your age think about America?” As Bradley puts it, “Partly he was conning her, partly he was conning himself, and partly he was being sincere, courting her.”
Meanwhile, Hart had incautiously struck up a friendship with William C. “Billy” Broadhurst, a lobbyist, fund-raiser, and political fixer from Louisiana. Broadhurst liked to have fun, and he and Hart partied together. Several Hart staffers thought there was something squirrelly about Broadhurst, and warned the candidate. They also learned that news organizations were considering surveillance of Hart’s house, and they warned Dixon. “We knew there was going to be a stakeout,” one staffer said, “and still nothing was done.”
In late April, Hart and Rice found themselves headed for Bimini together aboard an eighty-three-foot yacht chartered by Broadhurst and aptly named Monkey Business. On board as well was Broadhurst’s companion, Lynn Armandt, a foxy brunette, also twenty-nine and also Rice’s friend. Hart had a theory that media scrutiny came in waves: very intense periods alternated with slack periods, during which he would be virtually ignored. Since he believed he had just come out the other side of the media blitz ignited by his announcement that he was going to run for president, he somehow thought he would be invisible and allowed Armandt to take some snapshots of Rice sitting on his lap. When Armandt offered to take the roll to be developed, he said, “Sure.” Meanwhile, Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, had gotten an anonymous tip from a woman who told them that Rice would be flying to Washington’s National Airport on Friday, May 1. He asked investigative reporter Jim McGee to take Rice’s flight, but McGee lost her in the airport. Staking out Hart’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, however, a team from the Herald saw Hart and a woman entering and leaving.
The Herald published its story on Sunday, May 3, the very day that Hart’s dismissal of rumors of marital infidelity appeared in The New York Times. As Time magazine put it, “For Gary Hart, the end came with breathtaking speed. As the week began, he was the overwhelming front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, a Gulliver surrounded by political Lilliputians. But then came the most harrowing public ordeal ever endured by a modern presidential contender.… Like Hester Prynne, Hart stood in the public dock accused of adultery.” Hart reluctantly decided to abandon the race. Early in the morning of Thursday, May 7, Hart told his staff, “Let’s go home,” and flew to Denver on a chartered flight. He sat by himself and read a novel by Tolstoy, Resurrection.
Like everyone else, Beatty was stunned. But whereas Hart’s other Hollywood supporters fled, as if he had the plague, Beatty remained constant, directing his anger—he was “angry at everything” said one friend—not at Hart but at the news media and, for a moment, at Pat Caddell, whom the gossip mill had implicated in a plot to set Hart up. (Caddell was then working for Maryland senator Joe Biden, one of Hart’s rivals for the nomination.) When Caddell called Beatty that Thursday night, the actor said something like, “If I ever find out it was you, I’ll kill you,” and advised him to “look for cover.”
“It amazed me because Warren knew it wasn’t true,” recalls Caddell. “If I had wanted to take Gary Hart out with personal information, I would have had him out long before the race started. That’s not the way I do business.”
Beatty quickly came to his senses and insisted that Caddell come up to his house immediately. Caddell did so and found Beatty with Joyce Hyser and Sean Penn. Beatty was on the phone with Hart. Penn disappeared, and Caddell went to dinner with Hyser in Beverly Hills, where the actor finally joined them after they’d finished. Beatty asked Caddell for his thoughts. “Everyone is telling him to get out of the race,” Caddell responded. “I wouldn’t get out of the race.” He explained that to do so would enshrine him forever as “Donna Rice’s playmate.” Rather, Caddell continued, he should hold a press conference and say, “You’re not going to drive me out of the race. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Beatty got it right away. As Caddell put it, “That was his great political gift; he understood drama.” The two men left the restaurant and raced up Benedict Canyon to Beatty’s home, where the actor again got on the phone to Hart, who was preparing his withdrawal speech. Beatty urged him to stay in the race. “You’re crazy,” Beatty told him. “Don’t get out. There are a lot of people who think you have been wronged. You should tell them, ‘Hell no!’”
Hart replied, “Thanks, Warren,” and he began to draft a hell-no speech.
At 5:00 A.M. the next day, Beatty urged Hart to admit he was an adulterer and then refuse to answer any more questions about his personal life. He thought the flap would blow over.
Deputy campaign manager John Emerson said, “Warren, it’s raining concrete.”
Recalls Hart, “Warren told me not to withdraw, just drop off the campaign trail and see if sanity would reassert itself. But there were five hundred reporters camped out at my front gate. I was not inclined to wait it out.” He withdrew.
Says Ca
ddell, “The candidate had a deep need not to win.”
Later that morning, on Friday, May 8, a blindingly brief twenty-five days after he had announced his candidacy, Hart held his press conference at Denver’s Executive Tower Inn. “Under the present circumstances, this campaign cannot go on,” he said. His tone was harsh, relentless, and totally unapologetic: “I refuse to submit my family and my friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It’s simply an intolerable situation.”
Beatty slept through it, knowing the outcome. From his point of view, it was an assassination by the press. “I don’t think there is anything to be admired in lying and cheating, or philandering,” he said. “But there might be something to be admired in not burning people at the stake because they have these weaknesses.”
Says Hyser, “Warren was right there with him, as close as you could be to the next president of the United States. I don’t think he realized that Gary was a ticking time bomb. He was devastated. Incensed. Gary is totally self-destructive. How can you run for president and have a picture taken of a girl on your lap? How could you be so stupid? Warren felt that if Gary (or later Clinton) had just said, ‘It’s none of your business,’ we could be looking at a different world today.
“I believe Warren and Gary are very similar. To them, there’s something about the chase, the getting there, the possibilities of something happening, whether it be in a relationship or a career or a film project, that’s more exciting than the end result. Running for president is much more exciting than the reality of being president. We always used to joke that Warren wanted Gary’s life, and Gary wanted Warren’s life. But Gary was no Warren Beatty. That wouldn’t have happened to Warren. There’s nobody better at having a clandestine relationship than he is.”
Despite the candidate’s evident willingness to set the match to a spectacular auto-da-fé, some on Hart’s staff suspected that the candidate had been set up. In the mid-1970s, as senator, Hart had been a member of the Church Committee that had investigated CIA plots against the lives of foreign leaders and aired a lot of dirty CIA laundry. He also issued the highly critical Schweiker-Hart report, which concluded that the Warren Commission’s examination of the Kennedy assassination had been hobbled by the refusal of the CIA and the FBI to divulge crucial information. Hart not only favored reform of both agencies, he had called for reopening of the Kennedy investigation, thereby making enemies for himself within the intelligence community. As Bradley puts it, “He had poked his nose into a lot of places where powerful people don’t want noses poked.” Beatty had lived through one of the most violent passages in American history. While too sensible to be a conspiracy buff, he had nevertheless made The Parallax View, and was fascinated by the so-called secret history of the United States. Bradley continues, “He felt that Hart should have assumed right from the start that a lot heavier people than the Miami Herald would be following him around, like the CIA, especially since Bush, the Republican candidate, had been its director. He felt that Gary should have been much more cautious and not have assumed that there were moments when it was safe for him to indulge himself in ways that were not totally discreet.” As Beatty puts it, “I’ve assumed since 1961 that my phones may have been tapped.”
Caddell thinks watching what happened to Hart soured Beatty on running for office. “Not the Donna Rice part,” he says. “Warren doesn’t have anything to hide. He’s never cheated on his wife, he’s never been divorced, but it was watching Gary compromise. Warren’s not very good at compromising what he thinks is the truth. It’s not going to happen.” Says Beatty, “By the time it got around to ’88, what with the media frenzy combined with the financial necessities of running for office, it just seemed that I didn’t have the level of altruism required,” he says. “With the negative campaigning, more and more the honor was being sucked from the profession. The people who held public office were held up to ridicule and scandalized. And with the increasing sophistication of public opinion polling and the pursuit of money, anyone who was still trying his level best to contribute felt more and more prostituted in raising money and would get out.”
Ironically, minimizing Beatty’s role in the campaign may have backfired. “If Gary was going to be running around with other women, there probably wouldn’t have been any better running mate than Warren, because Billy Broadhurst turned out to be a complete idiot in handling the situation,” says Bradley. “Warren would have sussed it out in an instant. ’Cause he gets that stuff immediately.”
If he was disappointed in Hart, Beatty never expressed it publicly. Albeit not yet married, the behavior for which Hart was pilloried was too close to his own for him to throw stones. Jack Nicholson summed up the despair of many on the left when he said, “It was a catastrophe for all of us—like Ishtar. The disqualification of an inspired public servant. It made you embarrassed to be an American. Everyone was back on TV talking about God. I like Gary because he fucks.”
Dustin Hoffman saw Beatty almost every day and was as close to him as anyone during that period. He says, “I didn’t even know about Gary Hart. He never mentioned him.”
MISSING A release date is like raising a red flag on which is inscribed in bold letters “Film In Trouble.” And indeed, after Ishtar failed to make its Christmas 1986 opening, the press, already alerted to budget overruns, smelled blood in the water. It was too expensive, it was going to be a bomb, etc. Time magazine wondered whether Beatty could “turn movie production into a form of seduction, in which large, supposedly rational corporations are encouraged to spend bloated sums of money for unlikely enterprises.” The answer was yes, but in the case of Reds, that was a good thing. In the case of Ishtar, it wasn’t such a good thing. Beatty had narrowly dodged a bullet with Reds, but Ishtar became the new poster boy for over-budget movies. The Los Angeles Times tarred it as “the most expensive comedy ever made,” and started referring to it as “Warrensgate,” an allusion to the legendary flop Heaven’s Gate. Noted Dustin Hoffman, “The word went out that we’re perfectionists—which made it sound as if we had some disease.” Hyser recalls, “Warren started to take it personally. It was all about him and his indecision.”
Ishtar was being distributed by an unfriendly studio that Beatty suspected was sabotaging its own picture. He fought bitterly with Diller, who was in his camp, over the marketing of Reds. It can only be imagined how he dealt with Columbia. He reportedly rejected one studio marketing veteran assigned to Ishtar, saying, “I can’t use you. You’re a Puttnam man, and I think you’ll always be loyal to David and not to me.” According to another Columbia executive, “Everybody worked for Puttnam, and Puttnam was against the picture, so every decision that came from the studio he saw Puttnam influencing or controlling. I think in some respects he was right.”
The hostile press put Ishtar’s publicity campaign under a microscope. It was discovered that Beatty hired “Warren’s friend,” in Hoffman’s words, DP Bill Fraker, to shoot his TV interviews on 35 millimeter film instead of videotape. The day before Ishtar was released, Tom Shales, writing in the Washington Post, quoted several TV producers speculating that Beatty required 35 millimeter because people look better on film—read, younger—than on tape. He also revealed that a “five-part ‘GMA’ [Good Morning America] interview had never aired because Beatty additionally withheld some of the material shot, refusing to release it to the program.” The New York Times reported that “Mr. Beatty edited his interview with that program while transferring it from film to tape.”
Beatty’s reluctance to do press for his pictures was well known. “I’d rather ride down the street on a camel than give what is sometimes called an in-depth interview,” he said. “I’d rather ride down the street on a camel, nude… in a snowstorm… backwards.” But he realized that his refusal to speak to journalists hurt Reds, and in this case, the need for damage control was so great as to make riding a camel in a snowstorm nude and backwards the greater of two evils. He waged a vigorous, but ultimately fruitless, battle
to deflect attention from the picture’s finances. He deplored, and rightly so, the growing obsession with box office, which began after Reagan was elected, when the patina of corporate America was buffed to a high gloss and money became the measure of all things. In practical terms, it meant that the list of top weekend grossers moved out of the trades and into the daily press, and worse, from the business section to the arts pages, which suggested that a movie’s bottom line was becoming the new standard of taste. And worst of all, this information migrated to TV, where grosses became a staple of new celebrity shows like Entertainment Tonight, reported with the avidity that the business press reserved for the Dow.
But the good news was that Ishtar had three successful previews. Beatty said of the one in Toronto, “I have never had a more successful preview,” so much so that the studio and the principals discussed striking more prints and taking more theaters. May was apparently under the impression that it was going to be a big hit and went off to Tahiti on vacation.
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 48